Reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s amusing account of her family’s
“experience in Stone Age eating” (“Stone Soup,” in this week’s issue), I
inwardly cheered when she finally delivered her dismissal of the kooky
“pre-agricultural” diet: “From an environmental standpoint, paleo’s ‘Let them eat steak’ approach is a disaster.” “Yes!” I wanted to shout. And it’s a
disaster from another, more basic standpoint, too – the pleasure of good
eating. Kolbert quotes David Perlmutter as saying that “sandwiches are not just
hard on the digestive system; they wreak havoc on the mind.” I read that it
disbelief. Just the words “Schwartz’s smoked meat on rye” make me drool like
a Saint Bernard. I love sandwiches. And I
love reading about people who love sandwiches. See, for example, Calvin
Trillin’s delectable “New Grub Streets” (The
New Yorker, September 3, 2001):
It was on the way home from one of those rambles that I
stopped my bike on East Broadway and Forsyth, where street vendors were selling
several unfamiliar items. What caught my eye was a sandwich, tightly wrapped in
clear plastic. It consisted of an ordinary Western-style bun – what I assume
the Chinese would refer to with some word that translates literally as “the
sort of bread foreign devils eat” – and something green peeking out of the
middle. I risked a dollar for a taste. Inside the bun was a chopped vegetable
that have been bok choy or mustard greens, flavored with something that tasted
like horseradish. I loved it. Whenever I was in Chinatown during the next few
weeks, I’d pick up a few greens sandwiches and hand them out when I got back to
the Village, like trophies from an adventure abroad. When a recipient of my
largesse gobbled up the sandwich with great enthusiasm, I beamed with pride.
When someone took a couple of bites, thanked me with elaborate courtesy, and
carefully folded the plastic around the remains, I made an instantaneous
diagnosis: wooden palate syndrome. It turns out that you don’t have to known
what’s in a sandwich to feel proprietary about it.
Wooden palate syndrome
– a perfect diagnosis for David Perlmutter.
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